My most recent books are the Leader's Guide to Radical Management (2010), The Leader's Guide to Storytelling (2nd ed, 2011) and The Secret Language of Leadership (2007). I consult with organizations around the world on leadership, innovation, management and business narrative. At the World Bank, I held many management positions, including director of knowledge management (1996-2000). I am currently a director of the Scrum Alliance, an Amazon Affiliate and a fellow of the Lean Software Society. You can follow me on Twitter at @stevedenning. My website is at www.stevedenning.com.

I Miss You, Steve Jobs

My life is full of two kinds of stuff. Stuff that works perfectly and stuff that doesn’t.

In the category of stuff that works perfectly for me, there is my Nespresso coffee maker, my Olympus audio recorder, and of course, my iPod, my iPhone and my wife’s iPad.

In the category of stuff that doesn’t work perfectly, there is my PC that takes forever to start up and always unexpectedly “updating” at inconvenient moments and my TV which often suffers from irritating glitches. I could go on.

I am not at all a lifelong Apple fan. Back in those early days, I bought a PC, not an Apple II. I laughed at those Apple-fanatic friends who struggled through the Apple III, the Macintosh or the Newton. In fact, I was like one of those nerdy PC characters that Apple loves to mock in TV commercials.

So when the iPod came along, my first thought was, oh no, not more of that irritating Apple hype! You’ll never see me sporting those white ear plugs! But then, after a while, I thought: I do like music and I do need a music player. So I gave it a try and found, hey, this stuff is actually pretty neat.

The iPhone

I was also a reluctant cell phone user. All my friends had cell phones, but I said: I don’t want people telephoning whenever they want: I don’t want to be interrupted like that. But then, inevitably, I gave in to social pressure and got a iPhone and discovered that it, too, was pretty neat.

I assumed that all cell phones were the same. So when my daughter needed an iPhone, I said to her, “Why don’t you take my iPhone, and I’ll get a cheap substitute.” Was I ever wrong! I discovered that all cell phones are not the same. The cheaper substitute did almost everything that the iPhone did, but not quite. It didn’t sync as smoothly. It wasn’t as quick or convenient or easy to use. Whoever had designed my cheap substitute cell phone hadn’t anticipated my every thought and move, and made the phone ready for what I wanted to do. I discovered the huge difference between a gadget that worked perfectly and a gadget that doesn’t. After a few months, I threw away my cheap substitute and got another iPhone.

The iPad

I don’t have an iPad, but it has transformed my life, because my non-techie wife has one and loves it. When she had a PC, I was constantly being required to provide technical assistance to solve the myriad little issues that a PC is subject to. I no longer have to do any of that: her iPad is so easy to use, she is addicted to it.

And it’s not just that the iPad itself is easy to use. A bit part of the happiness comes from the effort that the guy at the Apple store who set her up on the iPad, was able to do it in a way that got her comfortable from the start, as I wrote about here.

The Apple Maps Fiasco

Getting stuff to work perfectly isn’t easy. It takes both great imagination to think through how users will use products and relentless attention to detail to make sure that the product does actually work this way. Every step along the way, there are temptations to compromise. “We need to do X, but that is really going to take a lot of time and trouble, and Y is almost as good. Let’s do Y, for the moment and we’ll get to X some time later.” One can imagine how many thousands of times that conversation must have happened in the development of the iPod, iPhone and the iPad.

Yet Steve Jobs, in his 1997-2011 incarnation, resisted those temptations and got it right for me, the customer. In his earlier life, with the Apple III and the Macintosh, he had made those kinds of mistakes. But he learned. He discovered what it took to make things perfect.

I disagree profoundly with arguments by writers like fellow Forbes Shel Israel that “if Steve Jobs were alive today, Apple Maps would have been introduced at the same time, in the same place and in the same shoddy condition.” All of the sensible money-oriented business reasons that Shel Israel gives why releasing a shoddy product made business sense is the antithesis of everything that Steve Jobs lived and fought for. He believed in excellence and was willing to fight to get it.

I agree with writers like my fellow Forbes contributor, Nigam Arora, that Steve Jobs would never have released the iPhone with Apple Maps in the state that it is in.

I miss you, Steve Jobs

As it happens, I don’t have an iPhone5 and I don’t use any kind of mapping App. So the Apple Maps fiasco doesn’t affect me practically.

But today, on the first anniversary of Steve Jobs’s passing, I do feel sad to see that his commitment to perfection at Apple is already beginning to erode.

As fellow staff writer on Forbes Eric Savitz writes, the maps fiasco may not be a big deal financially for Apple. But in the overall scheme of things, as a matter of principle, it’s an enormous deal. It signifies that Apple is becoming a company that is willing to compromise on quality in order to meet money objectives. It means that Apple is becoming just another mediocre money-making firm that will lack the capacity to make perfect products.

I am sad that Steve Jobs will not be around to prevent this erosion. I am sad that he will not oversee the development of a television product and service that runs as perfectly as my iPod, my iPhone or my wife’s iPad. I am sure that Apple will come up with something and it will probably be quite good.

But there is a huge difference between “quite good” and “perfect”. Steve Jobs stood for, and fought for, “perfect.” Losing Steve Jobs at such a young age, when he had so much ahead of him that he could have contributed, is an inexpressible sadness. If the human race is ever to achieve its potential it needs people who stand for and fight for “perfect”.

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Steve Denning, I’m happy that you you love Apple products and write about them so passionately.. I also love the iproducts, they have made my life much simpler. But I have to challenge your assumption about Steve Jobs being unwilling to launch a perfect product. Steve launched the iPhone 4 with antenna issues that were a bigger problem than this maps issue. I have personally used the new maps application here in Portland OR, and it works absolutely perfectly. I’m not saying the problem does not exist… I’m saying that your central premise in this post is sorely mis-guided. Please respond to the fact that Steve did in fact a launch a product 2 years ago that had major problems, and was not perfect as you say.

Thanks for your comment. We are talking about single data points and it’s always dangerous to extrapolate.

In the case of iPhone4 antenna, we can see that it was not part of a declining trajectory.

Scott Entwistle makes some great points in his comment.

He launched the iPhone while “still shooting for his *perfect.* He wanted a phone that was absolutely gorgeous, and he was not willing to compromise on this fact. I have personally never had a problem with the iPhone 4, and neither have most people I met. In that situation, you can understand why Jobs made the jump he did. The maps situation I feel is quite different than the antenna issue. The antenna issue seemed to be a situation of Jobs unwillingness to compromise on looks and style for better engineering. Maps just seemed to be a financial decision made because they could, done quickly to get Google out of the way. There is no face behind it driving it as a dream project, or as a wonderful new blah blah blah. It is just a feature, and it is poorly implemented.”

Also: “if Steve Jobs were still around, maps would have been released at the same time, but they would have been better. I think he would have micro managed, intimidated people into working faster, and simply met the deadline in a better fashion than it was met.”

As to whether the Maps issue signals the beginning of an overall decline at Apple, I agree that it’s too early to say definitively. It’s a single data point, but a worrying one. We just don’t know whether Tim Cook has the same drive for perfection. It’s a good sign that Apple is flying its flags at half mast. Time will tell. Stay tuned!

Thanks for replying.. Declining trajectory? I just don’t see it. The iPhone 5 is thinner, taller, lighter, twice as fast – This is NOT a declining trajectory. You minimize the impact and the severeness of the antenna mistake, then blow the maps thing out of proportion all the way to declining trajectory.. You fail to see whats in front of your face – Clearly. I say this with all due respect.

Thanks for your further comment. It is possible that I am quite wrong. An iPhone5 that is “thinner, taller, lighter, twice as fast” albeit with a flawed Maps App, may turn out to be a continuation of Apple’s positive trajectory. I hope you are right. Time will tell.

Great post Steve! I generally agree with everything you said, though it is very hard to say what *would* have happened. I like to believe the same things that you said, that perhaps Apple would have not released the maps service if Jobs was around. But, dennyhil is right, he did launch the iPhone 4 with the antenna issues even though he knew it could compromise the experience. I think the difference is that he did this while still shooting for his *perfect.* He wanted a phone that was absolutely gorgeous, and he was not willing to compromise on this fact. I have personally never had a problem with the iPhone 4, and neither have most people I met. In that situation, you can understand why Jobs made the jump he did.

The maps situation I feel is quite different than the antenna issue. The antenna issue seemed to be a situation of Jobs unwillingness to compromise on looks and style for better engineering. Maps just seemed to be a financial decision made because they could, done quickly to get Google out of the way. There is no face behind it driving it as a dream project, or as a wonderful new blah blah blah. It is just a feature, and it is poorly implemented.

I personally think that if Steve Jobs were still around, maps would have been released at the same time, but they would have been better. I think he would have micro managed, intimidated people into working faster, and simply met the deadline in a better fashion than it was met. However, I don’t think it would have been perfect. The real test comes in the coming months, because if maps wasn’t perfect when Jobs released it, he would have started cutting heads and riding everyone at the company hard until the experience was up to par. Perhaps Apple will still resolve the situation, but slowly, progressively, as normal companies do. We’ll see!

Mistakes are made at Apple. Without the Steve Jobs quality control filter in place more mistakes may make it to the surface. Tim Cook is not afraid to admit to a mistake and take strong action to remedy the error. He and everyone at Apple knows that there is no replacing Jobs. They have no power over that. What they do have control over is how well they can learn and respond to mistakes. That’s where Cook shines. Much like how a bone fracture heals, I think we’ll see a stronger-than-ever iOS Maps app in the near future.

Thanks for your comment. I agree that it’s a good sign that Tim Cook recognized and apologized for the mistake. I hope you’re right that we’ll see a stronger-than-ever iOS Maps app in the near future.

Even more important: I hope that I’m wrong that this single data point isn’t a sign of the slumping trajectory that I lament in the article. However on this anniversary, I mainly wanted to pay a tribute to what Steve Jobs exemplified–namely the relentless pursuit of perfection.

Perfection is something we should all aspire to. I try on a regular basis to issue error-free blogs. The fact that I occasionally fail doesn’t stop me from trying.

No, the Maps are a complicated issue. Google took something like nine years perfecting their maps. They are still working on that. The Google Street View car was only spotted in my city and in my region something like some months ago. Google employs something like 700 people all over the world just working in their maps. In fact, the conventional wisdom among Forbes.com bloggers was that Maps was a reason to be against Google because almost all of their profits comes from search, and things like Maps brought no money for Google. They were basically a waste of money.

Apple could never manage to make the same thing in a few months. Steve Jobs could yell at everyone at Cupertino, that would be impossible. Specially if you consider that Apple simply bought the data from Waze and TomTom. To me, that shows the dangers of outsourcing and why Apple was wrong to rely solely on outsourcing to manufacture it´s produts(That´s the biggest advantage that Samsung has over Apple).

I also could point out that Apple products were not perfect when Steve Jobs was alive. Their closed architecture is annoying, the Itunes software is horrible. Jobs may have created great products, but I don´t know whether he is the model of the “radical manager”.